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John Cook

I’m a Christian and I have been most of my life. However I guess you might call me a different Christian. You see, I have tried to live in a more factual world than I did some ten years ago. Back then, I bought all the Bible told me and followed everything I was told. I was very religious, but I have changed. Why, you might ask? Because I delved deep into my religion and my Bible. I read the Bible cover to cover, and I was astonished to find that experience leaving me with doubts. I had always been so sure of God, His word, and of my faith in Jesus.

So I read it again and scribbled down notes of those areas that left me wondering and took them to my pastor for discussion. After that I was even more doubtful. The problem was what my pastor attempted to push on me his obvious lack of Biblical knowledge or his strong opinions of taking the good, overlooking the bad. He could roll off the inspiring scriptures from memory for an hour. That’s good I guess as there are many in the Bible, but there is also a story of sorts. Yes, it’s disjointed, difficult to follow, and contains many contradictions, and things I had trouble reading–about burnings, killings, and jealous God who demands things that make no sense in today’s world. I wanted to understand it, and know it well–not just the good scriptures, but all the hate too. I wanted to know what I was worshiping better than I did as I had never given the Bible and the roots of my religion much more than the blind devotion to God my parents, my community, and pastor wanted (expected) to see.

But there was more to the Bible than that. Much more, as my version of the King James Bible has 1,590 pages, and even five hours of memorized scripture just cracks the door into the Bible. I wanted to know what my pastor found so repulsive in my questions concerning events in the Bible that are not mentioned in church. God’s loving the smell of burnt flesh, God murdering whole cities of people, slavery and how to care for slaves, how to whip them, why does God hate women, killing animals just to show reverence, and many others we don’t hear in church. Why were those passages not discussed.

After an hour of talk with my pastor–some of it very spirited–leaving him angered that I would bring up the negatives. He seemed to want just the positive aspects, but the Bible is a book, and filled with both. Why does he want to cherry pick the Bible. His answer when he was finally very flustered and angered was “If I told everything that was in the Bible I wouldn’t have much of a following would I?” In short, he’s cherry picking the Bible because it keeps us tithing. His claim that every minister of the faith does that. Perhaps that is why I was not a good minister. I didn’t have the answers, I knew only what I read, and those events were over 2,000 years in the past. I can’t know the truth. I can only know what some claim and others don’t, and what I read.

No! I want reality. I am not a Christian because I want to hide behind all the good without understand the other parts, good or bad. I wanted to understand my Bible in terms of factual reality, and you will not like what I discovered. Now I am an advocate of pulling out the good scripture, changing it into sayings that we as New Christians can gain inspiration from, and getting rid of the old Bible–including the God that it mentions. After all, if in times long past, the Bible was so heavily edited, re-edited, torn apart by kings who removed whole pages, re-translated, re-edited, and revised into hundreds of different versions, that it is no longer valuable as a reference. The circular argument that claims the Bible as the work of God falls apart when submitted to intelligence. But… But, that does not make the words attributed to Jesus wrong–and even if they are, so what. They are good words, and they should be the basis of our society.

So many people claim to be good Christians, but millions of those good Christians are in jails across the world, so it makes one wonder if they do know the sayings of Jesus and if they take them to heart. I understand, the Bible is huge, difficult to read and follow, and filled with contradictions for apologists to argue over. Then there is evolution to deal with. Science is not bound by ancient rules, is free to discover, and scientists who do well are finding or revising reality, not immersed in a past that demands adherence, regardless of what we find that shows us differently. Science has nothing to stand on other than the realities it can locate and prove with enough diligence and perhaps multiple attempts–to locate a more positive truth. Religion is stagnating on events of the past.

What most disturbs me about events of the past as that there were many thousands of Gods before the Christian God. Every one we accept as being invented by man. So why are we so sure of ours? Frankly, when I read the Bible, and I mean critically read the Bible, I don’t find what the average person does–because I look. I have been a believer all my life but that has faded because I examined my religion closely. Yes, Christianity appears to be a good religion until examined with an open mind. Then it appears to be something concocted 2000 years ago when tribal societies were here, on the verge of becoming more unified in larger cities, but still in existence especially in the middle east. Religion gets sticky when you attempt to realize that we were not the society then that we are now.

So what is the truth? It’s truly unknown as there are so may contradictions within the bible. What I have found is that our God is possible no different than any of the other roughly 5,000 differing religions of today. Just as we think their God is fictional, so may be ours. It is as unknown, but by comparison with the possibility of a hundred thousand or a million past Gods (including all the tribal Gods) the God Christians worship today is just as likely to be an ancient fable designed to hold people together around a core belief. If you are a rational person, that is undeniable, rational, and logical. But we don’t want to be logical, do we. Living in the spirit of a fable is fine as long as you don’t find the truth. Regretfully, most who examine the Bible realize the fallacies behind Christianity. Perhaps this is why 40% of today’s Christian ministers, preachers, and priests are atheists hiding behind a Biblical income.

So, if i may, as a truly good Christian, suggest that we drop the confusion of the Bible, re-write it not as a worship of God possibly as false as all the others we call false when the truth is simply that no one knows. So why can’t a group come together to take the good that Jesus said, and condense it into a very short, very good book of what we as a people should inspire to. Drop any reference to scripture and to the God we can’t prove any more than all the others, and place the good meaning of Jesus out as the Christians way of living. Perhaps that would help those future millions headed for jail because the Holy Scripture (the Bible) is so horrible difficult to read. Just take what Jesus said, rewrite it for today’s people, keeping all that he meant, and making it readable. Then adopt it as the new work about Jesus. I think that would solve a lot of problems and make it easier to spread His word. The words of Jesus align with many other religious scriptures, so it would not be so arguable as is the Bible.

I would like to see that as it would remove the problems of comprehending a religion written for tribal people over 2,000 years ago, and bring the best into modern America. .

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